by Joel Thornton

Created on: May 10, 2009   Last Updated: May 12, 2009

Sure, many of us find them irritating and wish that someone would tell them to shut up. Even the most Christian among us finds himself wishing that the Gospel message were kept within the walls of the Church, or at least some of the proponents of the message. After all, the Gospel message should not be offensive. Is it not true that Jesus is all about love and love is always a good feeling?

These arguments, and a variety of others, are the types of arguments we hear all the time for why the street preachers of our world should not be there. Even if we can find validity in these arguments, this is not reason enough to tolerate the killing of free speech.

The more the culture war rages the more we should be willing to protect the right of the speaker, even when we personally disagree with the subject of the speech. One of the guarantees in the free speech market is that a free society means that we will often hear things in public with which we disagree.

The measure of a truly free society is how much they respect dissent. Dissent is the heart of western culture. While we might argue that we should accept the discrimination because it is good for the church and the church only thrives in troubled times, we have to realize that this cannot be God's way.

Why would God create a system that only works when everyone turns against it. The problem is not that God's system does not work. The problem is that human nature is such that man has a hard time giving in to God's will.

Sure, historically the church thrives under persecution. It is one thing to understand the truth of the historic evidence; it is a completely different thing to understand that we do not have to accept the historic model as the only way the Church can thrive. We have to learn to thrive in peace and prosperity.

The voice of the evangelist on the street is important to more than the Church. It is important to the growing number of people in our culture who have no interaction with Christianany anywhere. It is also important because those voices crying in the wilderness are not always gentle. Thus, they remind us that there is more to life than the safety of our Christian hiding places. We have to interact with the world if we are going to be salt and light to them.

We have to work to keep society free, including keeping society free to preach the Gospel message in its simple most direct form. This is a form that is often not compatible to the politically correct

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